Weekend on a Star

Now for something different. Below are excerpts from my notes and journal from this past weekend. I spent Friday – Saturday on Star Island, a 40 acre rock in the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire, conducting interviews and collecting information on the peculiar geology and history of the island for a class assignment.

It was a moving experience, profound in unexpected ways.  The severity of the landscape and the realization that, for centuries, men have found a way to survive and live on this island hits you with the force of the Atlantic crashing against the granite cliffs.  The cliffnotes history of these Isles, a collection of nine small islands and craggy outcrops, is a story of prosperous fishing colonies in the 17^th and 18^th century that waxed, waned and disappeared, leading to an era of grand resort hotels in the19^th century, which eventually faded as well. Today the islands are have no permanent residents and only Star Island is regularly visited. Its new life is as a conference center and throughout the summer it swarms with hundreds of conferees and “personal retreaters” who return year after year, so devoted they are to this jagged piece of rock in the ocean.

I was overloaded with emotional testmonies and sensed immediately that the story of the Isles and the reasons why people return again and again so passionately are numerous and complex. Below are just a few excerpts of me trying to sort through all the different and contradictory themes of the experience.

Although it is a place of raw beauty and sobering isolation, and has been muse to many generations of artists, I found few solitary moments. When I was left to reflect, I was, perhaps inevitably, swept away in the romance of it all. The notes below come from my one hour alone, on the eastern-most arm of the island as the sun rose, and if they are overly sentimental, they are at least a partial portrait of the island.

Sunday, September 11, 2011, 6:00 am

“Once the sun floats above the horizon, its single arm reaches out to my rock, falling inches short of the white granite. In its half a millennia of human inhabitance, how many times have early risers seen the same sun? Fishermen un their boats, setting oar locks in places and dipping oars in at first light; Cooks in the kitchens f the grand hotels looking eastward out a window as the knead dough for breakfast bread; Shoalers on the back of the island, hitching horse to cart for a day of hay mowing; Sweethearts snuck out of bed, holding hands as color grips the sky; Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters visiting for the weekend, capturing one last sea-soaked memory before they return to shore.

Thousands of human lives, lived upon this rock, touched by this sun.

But then, how many times have these rocks lain cold in the night and witnessed the dawn of a new day? Hulking giants of jagged rock, thrust upward in volcanic turmoil. The flecks of minerals, garnet, quartz and mica, have met the ay, glistening in the sun an uncountable number of times. But rewind further, to a past the human mind struggles to grasp. To the eons of settling sediment, of grain compressed into monstrous rock, of the infinite years of geological formation before these Isles emerged from the sea.

There are ghosts on this island, certainly. Whispers of what has come and gone, and traces of past lives. But not all are human.

Perhaps that’s what draws shoalers back year after year: the ephemerality of human life confronts them here. They feel small, fleeting, which offers perspective and an appreciation for the life they have. How beautiful its is to be with life and glimpse this great earth, the UU minister said. Modernity lulls us in a flase sense of omnipotence and immortality: we can connect to anyone, anywhere; we can travel to any place; we can recover from any illness. Medicine and technology distract from the true fragility of our lives. In this lullaby we are wrenched by news of death or tragedy- we, as a generation, thought ourselves beyond that.

“Let’s remember a simpler time” they say often here and at other places with tangible histories. But this phrase is a sleight to the fortitude of our forebears. They too lived their lives, spinning a complex web of needs and desires, family and self, obligations and dreams. They pined, they yearned, they grieved, they loved, they died. … “Here, the same human dramas have played out over the centuries,” Alexandra [the winter caretaker who has spent 15 winters on the island alone] said. The cavernous Oceanic House is the same building it was in 1870. In it, visitors can grasp the notion of common humanity- we are all here, living day to day in a story that reaches back into infinity.

But on the rocks, we zoom wider still. This island the witness of so many human dramas, is the result of tectonic shifts, subterranean churning, a geological drama. We are species-centric as a tendency, ego-centric as a rule. Yet here, you can’t help but be reminded that, literally, this island, this crag of granite, this village, my life are blips in the ocean.

I will get back on the boat today, back in my car, return to my apartment and begin to fret about money, love, weight, future… But what I want right now is to stay here forever, in a solitary life without others, writing through the winter and greeting the sun, the granite, the gulls, and the salt each day until I die.”

And from the night before, under a full moon, where the cliffs slope down to the water’s edge:

“On a fingertip of rock, in a basin deepened and smoothed by tides, we light a fire, far from grasses. The Oceanic is a looming silhouette, with rectangled panes of yellow light and the cotton clouds dapple the moonlight. Most conferees are already sleeping. The women search for song to sing while I roast marshmallows for them. “He’s got the whole world, in his hands,” they warble, then “will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64…” but neither are properly remembered and instead they turn their attention to the smores. We brown marshmallows on wire prongs and smoosh them between graham crackers as the waves persist in their efforts to pull the granite under water.

I came to the island looking for a story of change. I found one, although its only perceptible on the smallest of scales: a young sapling, 15 years later is a two-story tree; a small cluster of rocks, the remaining foundation of a home, is overgrown with bayberry and poison ivy; the vein of space in a 200 year old tombstone has widened as ice enters, expands and cracks the rock.

To day-trippers, Star Island’s story is a comforting one of continuity in modern times. It is a place that buzzed and rushed through history, then beginning a century ago, stood still. When the rest of the world sped up, Star Island slowed down. Progress was always retarded by its severe isolation, and once innovation reached a threshold, it plateaued.

As modernity tears us from the past, hurling us forward into a foreign future, many people have fought to make Star Island a home for the present shoalers and a testament to its history. Rare are the cases where poignant remembrance is coupled with encouraged self-reflection and living ‘in the moment.’

“I come because it’s always the same,’ a devoted shoaler told me, her eyes carrying over the broad porch and rocking chairs of the Oceanic.

“I never ceased to be surprised by how changing the island is. Every time I walk by this jutting tooth of a rock, I am struck by how strangely and foreign it looks,” the long-tome winter caretaker of the island said.

On Star Island, visitors walk the wide hallways of the hotel, the bare wood floors tread by Nathaniel Hawthorne; they run their fingers along the staircase railing and only time separates their hands from Celia Thaxter’s [a renowned author, artists and resident of the Isles]. Then they leave hotel, and see the sumac overgrowing stone walls, gulls dashing crabs and shells on the water-side rocks, and snakes darting into the undergrowth. You need only watch the turbulent swells break over the crags of the island’s southern arm to sense the movement. This island isn’t suspended in time. It isn’t suspended anywhere. This island is simply bursting with life.”

Photos will follow tomorrow. Thanks!!